Library - Tutorial - Searching Online Indexes

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An Index is a resource that allows you to find articles within magazines and journals.  Just as the Online Catalog helps you to find books within a library by telling you where these items are located, an Index tells you in which magazines certain articles appear, including the year of publication, page numbers, and other relevant information.  There are a large number of Online Indexes available in libraries.  Although they will differ greatly in appearance and in the kinds of articles they will find, they will all allow you to search using the same basic techniques (this tutorial will focus on using Wilson Select Plus).  If you have taken the Online Catalog Tutorial already, then you have already practiced doing keyword and subject searches.  You can use the same techniques in what follows.

To get started, click on this link to open a new browser window so you can follow along with these instructions:

http://library.aup.edu/

Click on indexes and from the list provided click on Wilson Select Plus.  You'll see a screen like this:

Notice on the left hand side, in the blue bar under "Searching" that an arrow is pointing to "Basic."  This means that we're in the basic search screen.  In the yellow box, next to "Search for:" you'll see an area to enter your search terms.  Underneath that are options for how to search.  Keyword searching should be indicated (click on the circle next to it).  Start off by typing in the two words retail trends and click on search.  You could start by simply typing in "retail" but indexes are much bigger databases than library catalogs and you would get thousands of results.  If you have a more specific set of terms it's better to use them.  You'll get something like this:

In the gray area above you'll see that the index retrieved 205 items containing both the word retail and the word trends.  Since this is a large set of results, let's go back and use the advanced search feature to add more terms.  In this example, we'll assume that the topic is in the retailing of food.  On the left side in the blue box, click on "Advanced":

 
This should look somewhat similar to the online catalog's advanced search; you have places to enter your terms and you can select what kind of search you want to perform.  As above, enter retail trends in one box (making sure that it is a keyword search) and food, assuming you're interested in this more narrow topic.  Again make sure that keyword is indicated, and that the word "and" appears between the two concepts that you want to search.  You can also further narrow your search down by indicating that you only want materials in English, or by limiting to certain years, but that has not been carried out here.  Clicking on search, you'll see something like the following:

From 205 items we're now down to 20.  This is a good number to browse through.  Certainly not everything will be what you're looking for, but when you find something close to your topic, click on it to take a closer look.  This will bring up the record for this particular article, in this instance, item number 3:

Here, you can click on the link that says "View HTML Full Text" to read the article.  However, the information above is important too.  Just as in the catalog, where you looked at subject terms for additional ways to search, here you can look at Descriptors.  These are essentially the same as Subject Headings.  Click on one of them to execute a descriptor search, for instance, "Grocery shopping":

This descriptor search for "Grocery shopping" found 67 items, including some very different items than were found in the keyword search.  By browsing this list of records, you can get some additional ideas for further descriptor or keyword searches.  When you use other indexes, although they may look different, be sure to look for the same kinds of features, like advanced searches and subject (or descriptor) searches.